The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas - El Camino ...

The Person of the Son 185
accident nor a qualiWcation which ‘happens to’ God, but has the same nature
as God, for reason can show that the divine mind in God is nothing other
than God himself. The divine word is thus a distinct reality subsisting in the
divine nature.26
Has one then fallen for the rational temptation to prove an article of the
Creed and demonstrated the personal being of a Word in God? St Thomas’
answer to this would be ‘No’, because ‘the analogy with our minds does not
constitute a suYcient proof to demonstrate something about God, because
reason does not exist univocally in God and in us’.27 It is a matter of an
‘argument from congruity’, a ‘persuasive reason’ which enables one to grasp
only what has been received from revelation, that is to say the faith, made
known to us. But, using an analogy which gets to grips with the content of the
confession of faith, one has disclosed how we can get to grips with the
generation of the Word in God. This analogy preserves a profound respect
for God’s spiritual nature, since it draws on the word’s spiritual procession. It
attempts to illuminate believers’ minds by starting from what is closest to
them, the word in our own human mind, to open the door a little way onto
the mystery of the divine generation of the Word.
3. THE SON, WORD OF GOD
It is by means of his idea of Word that Thomas unveils a congruent way of
understanding the Son of God. But before he does that he subjects the name
Word to a linguistic critique, testing and Wne-tuning its precise quality.
Having drawn up the results of his analysis of the word, it is not diYcult to
show, Wrst, that ‘Word’ is very much a personal name for God. ‘It appears,
from what has gone before, that properly speaking the Word is always taken in
a personal sense in God, since a word designates nothing other than that
which is expressed by the one who knows.’28 In its created realization,
proportioned to what we can adequately know, that is, within our human
minds, in its principal and primary attribution, the word properly refers to
that which the mind conceives within itself when it takes a known reality as its
subject; in the second place, the word designates the external speech which
refers to this speaking with one’s self; Wnally, since the spoken word comes
from the imagination, it can signify the formative image of this speech. In his
26 In Ioan. 1.1 (nos. 26–28); cf. De rationibus fidei, ch. 3. Augustine writes about the divine
prerogatives of the Word in De Trinitate XV.XIII.22–XV.XVI.26.
27 ST I, q. 32, a. 1, ad 2. See above, in Chapter 2, ‘The Aim of Speculative Trinitarian
Theology’.
28 In Ioan. 1.1 (no. 29).